Traitor

As somebody who plays a lot of shock force 2, it's easy to forget that their equipment isn't necessarily bad, just woefully outdated. In CW, against equipment of the same generation, they can be quite scary. It would have been interesting to see how AFV development would have progressed if history played out differently, I doubt they would have been satisfied with slapping a cheap thermal on a T-72 and pretending it's a next generation tank like the Russians did (to be fair it was probably all they could afford with the implosion of the economy during the 90s).

I'm pretty sure that the 88mm can be fired from the travel carriage for the AT role in an emergency, maybe that's what the 2.5 min figure is referring to? Maybe such guns could get a semi-deployed state with low accuracy and fire rate to represent the crew desperately manhandling the gun into a barely usable position, while it still needs to be fully emplaced to have full accuracy and fire rate.

I think we'll be seeing more of how technology can allow for new ways to wage asymmetric warfare. Things you mentioned like drones, cyberwar etc are becoming increasingly accessible to many militaries, and it'll be very interesting to see how such innovations can be combined with more traditional asymmetric warfare techniques like guerilla warfare or traps such as IEDs which can help to offset the advantage that more conventional militaries have, we're already seeing some of it in Ukraine. We may very well be entering into a new military revolution where conventional warfare capabilities alone may not be sufficient.

Apologies, I'm not aware of that rule, my bad. But is necroing bug threads a problem if the bug is still present in the game? Would probably be neater than making a new thread describing an identical issue.

True, warfare is changing, especially with the rise of new technologies like drones. However, I expect most militaries to be rapidly developing anti-drone technology, jammers and the like so the effectiveness of cheap commercial off the shelf drones will greatly diminish and all remaining drones in warfare will need to be hardened in some way. In a conventional war, the US military does currently dominate over any potential opposition, but it remains to be seen if this lead will last. That's why I think the near future/near peer setting is an important one to model in wargames, sure, it's hypothetical in nature, but we can't assume that the US military will remain peerless 10, 20 or 30 years in the future and it is useful to simulate how well it does against an equivalent foe.

Soviet and Russian vehicles have really bad spotting when buttoned up, I know it's against doctrine but I like to open them up whenever possible when outside of small arms range especially in the modern games as whoever gets the first spot and fires first usually has the advantage. The only exception is if the vehicle has a CITV, then I think the spotting is good enough to stay buttoned up.

That's true, but the game was never meant to depict a real conflict, it was always intended to be a hypothetical scenario, set in the near future against a near peer enemy. When the game was released it was clear that it was meant to represent a hypothetical future conflict, in hindsight given how reality played out differently it might have been a better idea to set the game in 2027 instead of 2017 in order to get the same perspective. Obviously no military in the world is truly an equivalent to the US army, but that's the suspension of disbelief required in order to have a game with a near future/near peer scenario (It is still useful to model what conventional modern warfare against a similarly equipped enemy looks like). A fully realistic game would probably just play like Shock Force 2 again with the US army stomping any opposition with ease, but that won't be very useful when trying to see how well the US army would do against a broadly equivalent enemy. Perhaps a realistic modern scenario (without being set in the near future where you can write into the backstory that an adversary greatly beefed up their military and adopted new equipment) that doesn't just devolve into Shock Force 3 would require the US army to not be involved due to the sheer power disparity making the conflict no longer a near-peer one. However, the US army is basically required for a modern war game to sell well, thus the only real way to depict a near peer scenario is to have a hypothetical conflict where the enemy military is better equipped than in reality and have the audience suspend their disbelief.

Yeah, even if it was janky without proper animations, I would take functionality over graphics any day. I wonder if AA and Heavy guns not being able to be towed in WW2 CM games is due to the heavy tractors not being included in the games, or if the heavy tractors were not included because the AA and Heavy guns were not intended to be towed. A chicken and egg situation perhaps.

I'm a little embarrassed to ask but where's the proper place to report bugs? It feels like something that I should already know but I can't seem to figure it out.

While I agree that the methodology in those examples are ridiculous, I don't think that using Soviet documents is automatically a bad idea, not that you were saying that was the case of course, I understood you as saying that he cherry picks the finding from the studies that are in line with his pre-existing beliefs without considering the proper context etc, but I just felt like I should expand on the point of Soviet sources. When it comes to sources and documents from non-allied states like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, there is a tendency to dismiss all the data as inherently unreliable which isn't necessarily the case. After all, these countries were doing tests to collect data for their own military development, there is an incentive to collect accurate data that can help when designing their next tank or planning out future tank doctrine. It's a generally a bad idea for engineers to make up nonsense test results to send back to the ministry knowing that that bogus data will be used to design the next generation of tanks, that would ironically be much more deserving of punishment than simply reporting that the current equipment isn't up to snuff. What people should be looking at is the type of sources. Official press releases, state news, personal accounts, biographies and anything else intended for public consumption are not always the most reliable of sources and can include a great deal of propaganda, I would take them with a grain of salt even if they were written by the Allies. However, a declassified technical report meant for internal consumption within the ministry of defense can generally be assumed to be relatively accurate, in this case they need accurate data, they are perfectly capable of conducting accurate tests and there's no real incentive to make stuff up if the data was not meant to be publicly released. Like you mentioned, the Soviet helmet report did indicate that no usable conclusion could be drawn due to the flawed methodology, indicating that they were actually trying to collect usable data instead of just trying to show that their equipment was the best. For WW2 primary sources a good rule of thumb is that primary sources intended for internal consumption within the government or military tend to be at least fairly accurate as that was the information which the decision makers relied upon to fight the war, while primary sources intended for the general public can generally be assumed to include elements of propaganda. I don't know much about this Samsonov guy in particular, but from what I've read in this thread he translates Soviet primary sources, but tends to draw flawed conclusions from them. In this case, my suggestion would be to take his conclusions with a grain of salt and for people to look at the translated primary sources instead, consider the context in which those sources were written to gauge their reliability and draw their own conclusions from the sources.

A fictional setting doesn't mean it can't be based in reality, you can have fictional alliances of real countries like they did in ARMA, where there's a Chinese-Iranian led alliance doing a proxy war with NATO in a fictional Southern European country. It sounds plausible-ish but there's no such alliance in reality (yet) so there's no risk of it turning into a real conflict in the short term. I don't think you can eliminate the risk, but there are ways to minimize it, such as having the game take place a decade or two in the future where you have a bit more freedom in the geopolitical backstory. A EU vs USA scenario might not be as ridiculous if there's 10-20 years of backstory to get to that point: democratic backsliding, radical political parties and leaders seizing power, new alliances being forged with traditional adversarial countries, increasing resource scarcity and certain flashpoint locations (maybe even a fictional flashpoint location) can create a reasonably plausible scenario where such a conflict can happen. It depends on the writing and how far in the future you are willing to go, we have to remember that current global alliances are not set in stone. Or there can also be realistic-sounding scenarios that are extremely unlikely to ever happen, such as China vs Japan, with the potential involvement of Russia, North Korea, South Korea, USA and maybe Iran or select EU countries as expansions (North Korea vs South Korea directly is too risky of a title in my opinion). Such a scenario is probably impossible in real life, but you wouldn't have to suspend too much disbelief for it.

True, shooting and scooting to another prepared position after an AT gun is revealed does sound like good idea, I haven't considered that. Not sure if it was done though. I know that many heavy guns are theoretically capable of being set up in a few minutes or even fired from the travel mount in emergencies, but I'm not sure how often it was actually done or if was common enough to implement into CM games. I feel like it probably wouldn't be done in ideal scenarios as you wouldn't want to risk the vulnerable transports.

I assume it's for the same reason that many other heavy prime movers are not included, it's technically outside of the scope of CM games. Those large guns would be impractical to use in a mobile offensive role, and if they're already in place they don't need to be moved and so the heavy prime movers will be well behind the lines and out of combat. That being said, it would be pretty neat, I won't be complaining if they if they eventually introduce heavy prime movers so we could move the big guns despite the impracticality

Understood, thanks. I suppose that means that individual soldiers in Syrian Squads are on average are slower to spot and in some cases cannot spot certain targets even with the leader being equipped with NVGs, as they're basically reliant on the leader and unable to do any real spotting themselves. I wonder if the same situation is played out with the binoculars as many squads across the games are only equipped with one pair belonging to the leader as well. This is interesting though, I wonder if it's ever been a real doctrine for armies on a budget to equip only the squad leaders with night vision goggles and have the rest of the squad just try to work with what the leader can see and inform them of. Sounds like such a squad would be capable of area fire at best and only the leader would be putting out anything that can be considered aimed fire.

I don't trust anything in the Syrian arsenal to reliably spot anything at night other than the T-72 Turms-T, T-90 and AT-14 (Kornet). The AT-13 can do ok night spotting, but it doesn't have thermals despite what the manual says, just regular night vision.